Hamilton let down by software "bug"

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff blamed a "software bug" for the team's strategy mis-step which allowed Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel to win the Australian Grand Prix for a second year in a row. Lewis Hamilton was robbed of a certain victory after Vettel sneaked ahead under the Virtual Safety Car.

Hamilton converted his record-breaking seventh Australian pole position into a healthy lead over Kimi Raikkonen and Vettel, but Ferrari triumphed in Albert Park's pit lane, as they did in 2017.

After the Haas of Romain Grosjean retired, Vettel dived into the pits from first position, emerging ahead of Hamilton, who had pitted six laps earlier and was not informed by his team that he was under pressure to get back into the lead.

When Hamilton demanded answers from his team, race engineer Pete Bonnington reported: "We thought we were safe, but there's obviously something wrong."

And Wolff immediately absolved his team of any blame, saying that the world champions' systems had gone wrong.

"It's very hard to take because we had the pace. For whatever reason, we need to find out, we lost the win," Wolff told Sky Sports.

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We’ll get him next time! ????????#DrivenByEachOther #AusGP ???????? pic.twitter.com/hKl2HKjBqd — Mercedes-AMG F1 (@MercedesAMGF1) March 25, 2018

"We thought we had about three seconds margin. I don't know what happened to them, we need to ask the computers and that's what we are doing at the moment. Whether we had a software problem somewhere, we need to fix it.

"I think the problem is within our systems. I think we have a bug somewhere that said 15 seconds is what you need, we had 12, it should have been enough but it wasn't.

"He was attacking flat out but you can see the overtaking is pretty bad here. Even the mega overtakers couldn't make a pass. Lewis had to give up because the tyres wouldn't have made it to the end."

Wolff added: "I think we have a software issue with the VSC data, a situation that we haven't had yet with a special constellation of cars on track, one going in high speeds and one in slow speeds. The gap that we needed was wrongly calculated by the systems.

"I think the way the algorithm is set up, the way the computer is being programmed, we always had the green light and the gap was enough for us to stay ahead. And then we saw the TV pictures and it wasn't enough."